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If you’ve ever dug into the underpinnings of a browser extension, or maybe even created one yourself, you’ve seen the manifest.json file that acts as a sort of usage guide for an extension. Not the kind of usage guide most people would want to read, but it’s vital for browsers. The manifest file tells them what name and version to display, who the author is, what permissions to request access to, which icons to display, what css and js files to load and when. It’s important, but once you get the hang of it, pretty simple to implement. You create it and move on, only ever reopening it to bump the version when you’ve got something new to publish, and maybe requesting a new permission. ...

Every Google calendar URL has an iCal file you can use… here’s how to find it.

Google provides some amazing tools, but at what cost to privacy? One of the biggest blockers in eliminating them has been finding a reliable and affordable replacement for email (and ideally, calendar, documents, tasks, etc too). Well I may have finally found it, in Mailbox.org.

The Google Books API provides access to Google Books, which lets you search for any book and, at a bare minimium, see meta data about it. Depending on copyright status, you might also be able to see sample pages or read the entire book. You can also buy books.

The Google Maps API is a series of APIs for multiple platforms, each focused on a small set of tasks. At first it all seems a bit overwhelming, but each of them is pretty easy to use. Let’s check a few out!